Pop-rock has long been the genre most willing to make a fool of itself in the service of emotional honesty, and Hailey Hermida, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter who began her craft at thirteen during the hollow quiet of a pandemic, understands this better than most of her contemporaries. Her new single "17" is not a polished meditation on adolescence. It is a scream recorded the day after a fight, a week before her eighteenth birthday, and it sounds exactly like that — raw, slightly dangerous, and absolutely alive.

Etta Heartfield's debut single is not a confession. It is something altogether more commanding — a reckoning rendered in sound, set to haunt you long after the last note dissolves.

Nobody asked Bristol to save the dancefloor. And yet here we are. Junonuno — the intergalactic pop project of Nuno and DJ Juno — have arrived with "Feeling Good," a track that does precisely what it promises and refuses, loudly, to apologise for it. Pop music about joy is the oldest game going, but pulling it off without condescension or cliché remains as difficult as ever. The fact that this duo manage it with such effortless swagger says rather a lot about the quality of what they've cooked up.

Grief, as any seasoned listener knows, rarely announces itself with a brass band. More often it arrives quietly, on a Tuesday morning, wearing the face of someone you used to love. State of Us, Bergen's quietly industrious indie pop outfit, understand this particular species of melancholy better than most acts currently occupying the melodic pop rock territory. "Adore," their new single, doesn't mourn. It remembers. And that distinction — subtle as the difference between rain and the smell of rain — is precisely what elevates this track above the considerable pile of breakup-adjacent songs cluttering streaming platforms this season.

**The London-based artist delivers a debut single of rare spiritual weight, asking Afrobeats to carry something it has seldom been asked to carry before.** London has always been a city of doubled selves. You arrive carrying one world inside you and find another world pressing against it from every direction. For decades, artists have tried to make music out of that friction — the reggae that came out of Brixton, the grime that erupted from tower blocks in east London, the drill that mapped territories most of the country preferred not to think about. OLA B, a Yoruba artist operating entirely in the shadows of anonymity, has now added something stranger and more searching to that lineage: a meditation on the divine inner self, delivered in three versions, that sounds like nothing else currently circulating in the Afrobeats universe.

**The Finns return from a decade of silence with a single that understands exactly what guitars were put on this earth to do.** Ten years is a long time to say nothing. Long enough for entire movements to rise, implode, get reappraised on music Twitter, and quietly retire to Spotify playlists titled *Late Night Drive Vibes*. Long enough for the people who loved your debut to have married, divorced, changed careers, or simply stopped caring about guitar music altogether. Helsinki's Waves of the Echo have spent a decade doing precisely what their name suggests — waiting in the reverb, letting the sound travel back to them — and now they've arrived with *Words*, a single that announces their return not with a whisper but with the kind of riff that makes you instinctively reach for the volume knob and twist it clockwise until something rattles.

British music criticism has always reserved a particular reverence for the American singer who operates entirely outside the machinery — the one who builds her own house, furnishes it on her own terms, and then invites you inside without apology. MILYAM, performing under her own MILYAM EMPIRE imprint, is precisely that kind of artist. And *Intimacy*, her latest single, is the kind of record that makes you sit very still and reconsider whatever you were planning to do with the next four minutes of your life.

**The Miami-based songwriter steps boldly sideways, and the view from the edge is rather magnificent.** Kim Cameron has spent the better part of her career doing what the dance floor demands of her: moving forward, keeping the beat, never stopping long enough to breathe. Three Billboard chart entries will do that to a person. So it says something about the particular confidence — or perhaps the particular restlessness — of a truly gifted songwriter that she would choose this moment, at the height of her creative currency, to stop the pounding kick drum and simply… exhale.

*The Massachusetts teenager turns a party into a philosophical crisis, and somehow makes it sound like the most natural thing in the world.* Sixteen is a peculiar age to be writing about the tyranny of time. Most songwriters spend their teenage years cataloguing first kisses and Friday nights, saving their existential reckoning for the back half of their twenties, when the hangovers last three days and the career hasn't quite materialised. Ava Valianti, apparently, did not receive that particular memo.

**By the time A Floor Below have finished with you, you will not be entirely sure which side of the walls you are on. That is precisely the point.** The concept album has always been a dangerous gamble — a format littered with the wreckage of bands who confused ambition for architecture. *The Asylum*, the latest offering from A Floor Below, does something rather more interesting than merely avoid that fate: it makes the very concept of confinement feel liberating. This is a record that locks you in a room and hands you the key, then dares you to decide whether you actually want to leave.